The First Men in the Moon potx

And there it would have lainand fizzled, like one or two other little things these scientific people havelit and dropped about us.pos-When I realised this, it was I did the talking, and

The First Men in the Moon

Wells, H G

Published: 1901

Categorie(s): Fiction, Science Fiction

Source: http://en.wikisource.org

About Wells:

Herbert George Wells, better known as H G Wells, was an Englishwriter best known for such science fiction novels as The Time Machine,The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man and The Island of Doctor Mor-eau He was a prolific writer of both fiction and non-fiction, and pro-duced works in many different genres, including contemporary novels,history, and social commentary He was also an outspoken socialist Hislater works become increasingly political and didactic, and only his earlyscience fiction novels are widely read today Wells, along with HugoGernsback and Jules Verne, is sometimes referred to as "The Father ofScience Fiction" Source: Wikipedia

Also available on Feedbooks for Wells:

• The War of the Worlds (1898)

• The Time Machine (1895)

• A Modern Utopia (1905)

• The Invisible Man (1897)

• Tales of Space and Time (1900)

• The Island of Dr Moreau (1896)

• The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth (1904)

• The Sleeper Awakes (1910)

• The Story of the Inexperienced Ghost (1902)

• A Dream of Armageddon (1901)

Copyright: This work is available for countries where copyright is

Life+50 or in the USA (published before 1923)

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Chapter 1

Mr Bedford Meets Mr Cavor at Lympne

As I sit down to write here amidst the shadows of vine-leaves under theblue sky of southern Italy, it comes to me with a certain quality of aston-ishment that my participation in these amazing adventures of Mr Cavorwas, after all, the outcome of the purest accident It might have been anyone I fell into these things at a time when I thought myself removedfrom the slightest possibility of disturbing experiences I had gone toLympne because I had imagined it the most uneventful place in theworld "Here, at any rate," said I, "I shall find peace and a chance towork!"

And this book is the sequel So utterly at variance is destiny with allthe little plans of men I may perhaps mention here that very recently Ihad come an ugly cropper in certain business enterprises Sitting nowsurrounded by all the circumstances of wealth, there is a luxury in ad-mitting my extremity I can admit, even, that to a certain extent my dis-asters were conceivably of my own making It may be there are direc-tions in which I have some capacity, but the conduct of business opera-tions is not among these But in those days I was young, and my youthamong other objectionable forms took that of a pride in my capacity foraffairs I am young still in years, but the things that have happened to mehave rubbed something of the youth from my mind Whether they havebrought any wisdom to light below it is a more doubtful matter

It is scarcely necessary to go into the details of the speculations thatlanded me at Lympne, in Kent Nowadays even about business transac-tions there is a strong spice of adventure I took risks In these thingsthere is invariably a certain amount of give and take, and it fell to me fi-nally to do the giving reluctantly enough Even when I had got out ofeverything, one cantankerous creditor saw fit to be malignant Perhapsyou have met that flaming sense of outraged virtue, or perhaps you haveonly felt it He ran me hard It seemed to me, at last, that there was noth-ing for it but to write a play, unless I wanted to drudge for my living as a

clerk I have a certain imagination, and luxurious tastes, and I meant tomake a vigorous fight for it before that fate overtook me In addition to

my belief in my powers as a business man, I had always in those dayshad an idea that I was equal to writing a very good play It is not, I be-lieve, a very uncommon persuasion I knew there is nothing a man can

do outside legitimate business transactions that has such opulent ilities, and very probably that biased my opinion I had, indeed, got intothe habit of regarding this unwritten drama as a convenient little reserveput by for a rainy day That rainy day had come, and I set to work

possib-I soon discovered that writing a play was a longer business than possib-I hadsupposed; at first I had reckoned ten days for it, and it was to have apied-a-terre while it was in hand that I came to Lympne I reckoned my-self lucky in getting that little bungalow I got it on a three years' agree-ment I put in a few sticks of furniture, and while the play was in hand Idid my own cooking My cooking would have shocked Mrs Bond Andyet, you know, it had flavour I had a coffee-pot, a sauce-pan for eggs,and one for potatoes, and a frying-pan for sausages and bacon—suchwas the simple apparatus of my comfort One cannot always be magnifi-cent, but simplicity is always a possible alternative For the rest I laid in

an eighteen-gallon cask of beer on credit, and a trustful baker came eachday It was not, perhaps, in the style of Sybaris, but I have had worsetimes I was a little sorry for the baker, who was a very decent man in-deed, but even for him I hoped

Certainly if any one wants solitude, the place is Lympne It is in theclay part of Kent, and my bungalow stood on the edge of an old sea cliffand stared across the flats of Romney Marsh at the sea In very wetweather the place is almost inaccessible, and I have heard that at timesthe postman used to traverse the more succulent portions of his routewith boards upon his feet I never saw him doing so, but I can quite ima-gine it Outside the doors of the few cottages and houses that make upthe present village big birch besoms are stuck, to wipe off the worst ofthe clay, which will give some idea of the texture of the district I doubt ifthe place would be there at all, if it were not a fading memory of thingsgone for ever It was the big port of England in Roman times, Portus Le-manis, and now the sea is four miles away All down the steep hill areboulders and masses of Roman brickwork, and from it old WatlingStreet, still paved in places, starts like an arrow to the north I used tostand on the hill and think of it all, the galleys and legions, the captivesand officials, the women and traders, the speculators like myself, all theswarm and tumult that came clanking in and out of the harbour And

now just a few lumps of rubble on a grassy slope, and a sheep ortwo—and I And where the port had been were the levels of the marsh,sweeping round in a broad curve to distant Dungeness, and dotted hereand there with tree clumps and the church towers of old medical townsthat are following Lemanis now towards extinction.

That outlook on the marsh was, indeed, one of the finest views I haveever seen I suppose Dungeness was fifteen miles away; it lay like a raft

on the sea, and farther westward were the hills by Hastings under thesetting sun Sometimes they hung close and clear, sometimes they werefaded and low, and often the drift of the weather took them clean out ofsight And all the nearer parts of the marsh were laced and lit by ditchesand canals

The window at which I worked looked over the skyline of this crest,and it was from this window that I first set eyes on Cavor It was just as Iwas struggling with my scenario, holding down my mind to the sheerhard work of it, and naturally enough he arrested my attention

The sun had set, the sky was a vivid tranquillity of green and yellow,and against that he came out black—the oddest little figure

He was a short, round-bodied, thin-legged little man, with a jerkyquality in his motions; he had seen fit to clothe his extraordinary mind in

a cricket cap, an overcoat, and cycling knickerbockers and stockings.Why he did so I do not know, for he never cycled and he never playedcricket It was a fortuitous concurrence of garments, arising I know nothow He gesticulated with his hands and arms, and jerked his headabout and buzzed He buzzed like something electric You never heardsuch buzzing And ever and again he cleared his throat with a most ex-traordinary noise

There had been rain, and that spasmodic walk of his was enhanced bythe extreme slipperiness of the footpath Exactly as he came against thesun he stopped, pulled out a watch, hesitated Then with a sort of con-vulsive gesture he turned and retreated with every manifestation ofhaste, no longer gesticulating, but going with ample strides that showedthe relatively large size of his feet—they were, I remember, grotesquelyexaggerated in size by adhesive clay—to the best possible advantage.This occurred on the first day of my sojourn, when my play-writingenergy was at its height and I regarded the incident simply as an annoy-ing distraction—the waste of five minutes I returned to my scenario Butwhen next evening the apparition was repeated with remarkable preci-sion, and again the next evening, and indeed every evening when rainwas not falling, concentration upon the scenario became a considerable

effort "Confound the man," I said, "one would think he was learning to

be a marionette!" and for several evenings I cursed him pretty heartily.Then my annoyance gave way to amazement and curiosity Why onearth should a man do this thing? On the fourteenth evening I couldstand it no longer, and so soon as he appeared I opened the french win-dow, crossed the verandah, and directed myself to the point where he in-variably stopped

He had his watch out as I came up to him He had a chubby, rubicundface with reddish brown eyes—previously I had seen him only againstthe light "One moment, sir," said I as he turned He stared "One mo-ment," he said, "certainly Or if you wish to speak to me for longer, and it

is not asking too much—your moment is up—would it trouble you to company me?"

ac-"Not in the least," said I, placing myself beside him

"My habits are regular My time for intercourse—limited."

"This, I presume, is your time for exercise?"

"It is I come here to enjoy the sunset."

"You don't."

"Sir?"

"You never look at it."

"Never look at it?"

"No I've watched you thirteen nights, and not once have you looked

at the sunset—not once."

He knitted his brows like one who encounters a problem

"Well, I enjoy the sunlight—the atmosphere—I go along this path,through that gate"—he jerked his head over his shoulder—"andround—"

"You don't You never have been It's all nonsense There isn't a way.To-night for instance—"

"Oh! to-night! Let me see Ah! I just glanced at my watch, saw that Ihad already been out just three minutes over the precise half-hour, de-cided there was not time to go round, turned—"

"You always do."

He looked at me—reflected "Perhaps I do, now I come to think of it.But what was it you wanted to speak to me about?"

"Why, this!"

"This?"

"Yes Why do you do it? Every night you come making a noise—"

"Making a noise?"

"Like this." I imitated his buzzing noise He looked at me, and it wasevident the buzzing awakened distaste "Do I do that?" he asked.

"Every blessed evening."

"I had no idea."

He stopped dead He regarded me gravely "Can it be," he said, "that Ihave formed a Habit?"

"Well, it looks like it Doesn't it?"

He pulled down his lower lip between finger and thumb He regarded

a puddle at his feet

"My mind is much occupied," he said "And you want to know why!Well, sir, I can assure you that not only do I not know why I do thesethings, but I did not even know I did them Come to think, it is just asyou say; I never _have_ been beyond that field… And these things an-noy you?"

For some reason I was beginning to relent towards him "Not annoy," Isaid "But—imagine yourself writing a play!"

"I couldn't."

"Well, anything that needs concentration."

"Ah!" he said, "of course," and meditated His expression became soeloquent of distress, that I relented still more After all, there is a touch ofaggression in demanding of a man you don't know why he hums on apublic footpath

"You see," he said weakly, "it's a habit."

"Oh, I recognise that."

"I must stop it."

"But not if it puts you out After all, I had no business—it's something

of a liberty."

"Not at all, sir," he said, "not at all I am greatly indebted to you Ishould guard myself against these things In future I will Could Itrouble you—once again? That noise?"

"Something like this," I said "Zuzzoo, zuzzoo But really, you know—"

"I am greatly obliged to you In fact, I know I am getting absurdlyabsent-minded You are quite justified, sir—perfectly justified Indeed, I

am indebted to you The thing shall end And now, sir, I have alreadybrought you farther than I should have done."

"I do hope my impertinence—"

"Not at all, sir, not at all."

We regarded each other for a moment I raised my hat and wished him

a good evening He responded convulsively, and so we went our ways

At the stile I looked back at his receding figure His bearing hadchanged remarkably, he seemed limp, shrunken The contrast with hisformer gesticulating, zuzzoing self took me in some absurd way aspathetic I watched him out of sight Then wishing very heartily I hadkept to my own business, I returned to my bungalow and my play.

The next evening I saw nothing of him, nor the next But he was verymuch in my mind, and it had occurred to me that as a sentimental comiccharacter he might serve a useful purpose in the development of myplot The third day he called upon me

For a time I was puzzled to think what had brought him He made different conversation in the most formal way, then abruptly he came tobusiness He wanted to buy me out of my bungalow

in-"You see," he said, "I don't blame you in the least, but you've destroyed

a habit, and it disorganises my day I've walked past here foryears—years No doubt I've hummed… You've made all thatimpossible!"

I suggested he might try some other direction

"No There is no other direction This is the only one I've inquired.And now—every afternoon at four—I come to a dead wall."

"But, my dear sir, if the thing is so important to you—"

"It's vital You see, I'm—I'm an investigator—I am engaged in a entific research I live—" he paused and seemed to think "Just overthere," he said, and pointed suddenly dangerously near my eye "Thehouse with white chimneys you see just over the trees And my circum-stances are abnormal—abnormal I am on the point of completing one ofthe most important—demonstrations—I can assure you one of the mostimportant demonstrations that have ever been made It requires constantthought, constant mental ease and activity And the afternoon was mybrightest time!—effervescing with new ideas—new points of view."

sci-"But why not come by still?"

"It would be all different I should be self-conscious I should think ofyou at your play—watching me irritated—instead of thinking of mywork No! I must have the bungalow."

I meditated Naturally, I wanted to think the matter over thoroughlybefore anything decisive was said I was generally ready enough forbusiness in those days, and selling always attracted me; but in the firstplace it was not my bungalow, and even if I sold it to him at a good price

I might get inconvenienced in the delivery of goods if the current owner

well—undischarged It was clearly a business that required delicate

handling Moreover, the possibility of his being in pursuit of some able invention also interested me It occurred to me that I would like toknow more of this research, not with any dishonest intention, but simplywith an idea that to know what it was would be a relief from play-writ-ing I threw out feelers.

valu-He was quite willing to supply information Indeed, once he was fairlyunder way the conversation became a monologue He talked like a manlong pent up, who has had it over with himself again and again Hetalked for nearly an hour, and I must confess I found it a pretty stiff bit oflistening But through it all there was the undertone of satisfaction onefeels when one is neglecting work one has set oneself During that firstinterview I gathered very little of the drift of his work Half his wordswere technicalities entirely strange to me, and he illustrated one or twopoints with what he was pleased to call elementary mathematics, com-puting on an envelope with a copying-ink pencil, in a manner that made

it hard even to seem to understand "Yes," I said, "yes Go on!" less I made out enough to convince me that he was no mere crank play-ing at discoveries In spite of his crank-like appearance there was a forceabout him that made that impossible Whatever it was, it was a thingwith mechanical possibilities He told me of a work-shed he had, and ofthree assistants—originally jobbing carpenters—whom he had trained.Now, from the work-shed to the patent office is clearly only one step Heinvited me to see those things I accepted readily, and took care, by a re-mark or so, to underline that The proposed transfer of the bungalow re-mained very conveniently in suspense

Neverthe-At last he rose to depart, with an apology for the length of his call.Talking over his work was, he said, a pleasure enjoyed only too rarely Itwas not often he found such an intelligent listener as myself, he mingledvery little with professional scientific men

"So much pettiness," he explained; "so much intrigue! And really,when one has an idea—a novel, fertilising idea—I don't want to be un-charitable, but—"

I am a man who believes in impulses I made what was perhaps a rashproposition But you must remember, that I had been alone, play-writing

in Lympne, for fourteen days, and my compunction for his ruined walkstill hung about me "Why not," said I, "make this your new habit? In theplace of the one I spoilt? At least, until we can settle about the bungalow.What you want is to turn over your work in your mind That you havealways done during your afternoon walk Unfortunately that'sover—you can't get things back as they were But why not come and talk

about your work to me; use me as a sort of wall against which you maythrow your thoughts and catch them again? It's certain I don't knowenough to steal your ideas myself—and I know no scientific men—"

I stopped He was considering Evidently the thing, attracted him "ButI'm afraid I should bore you," he said

"You think I'm too dull?"

"Oh, no; but technicalities—"

"Anyhow, you've interested me immensely this afternoon."

"Of course it would be a great help to me Nothing clears up one'sideas so much as explaining them Hitherto—"

"My dear sir, say no more."

"But really can you spare the time?"

"There is no rest like change of occupation," I said, with profoundconviction

The affair was over On my verandah steps he turned "I am alreadygreatly indebted to you," he said

I made an interrogative noise

"You have completely cured me of that ridiculous habit of humming,"

He came the next day, and again the next day after that, and deliveredtwo lectures on physics to our mutual satisfaction He talked with an air

of being extremely lucid about the "ether" and "tubes of force," and

"gravitational potential," and things like that, and I sat in my otherfolding-chair and said, "Yes," "Go on," "I follow you," to keep him going

It was tremendously difficult stuff, but I do not think he ever suspectedhow much I did not understand him There were moments when Idoubted whether I was well employed, but at any rate I was resting fromthat confounded play Now and then things gleamed on me clearly for aspace, only to vanish just when I thought I had hold of them Sometimes

my attention failed altogether, and I would give it up and sit and stare athim, wondering whether, after all, it would not be better to use him as acentral figure in a good farce and let all this other stuff slide And then,perhaps, I would catch on again for a bit

At the earliest opportunity I went to see his house It was large andcarelessly furnished; there were no servants other than his three assist-ants, and his dietary and private life were characterised by a philosoph-ical simplicity He was a water-drinker, a vegetarian, and all those logicaldisciplinary things But the sight of his equipment settled many doubts.

It looked like business from cellar to attic—an amazing little place to find

in an out-of-the-way village The ground-floor rooms contained benchesand apparatus, the bakehouse and scullery boiler had developed into re-spectable furnaces, dynamos occupied the cellar, and there was a gaso-meter in the garden He showed it to me with all the confiding zest of aman who has been living too much alone His seclusion was overflowingnow in an excess of confidence, and I had the good luck to be therecipient

The three assistants were creditable specimens of the class of men" from which they came Conscientious if unintelligent, strong, civil,and willing One, Spargus, who did the cooking and all the metal work,had been a sailor; a second, Gibbs, was a joiner; and the third was an ex-jobbing gardener, and now general assistant They were the merest la-bourers All the intelligent work was done by Cavor Theirs was thedarkest ignorance compared even with my muddled impression

"handy-And now, as to the nature of these inquiries Here, unhappily, comes agrave difficulty I am no scientific expert, and if I were to attempt to setforth in the highly scientific language of Mr Cavor the aim to which hisexperiments tended, I am afraid I should confuse not only the reader butmyself, and almost certainly I should make some blunder that wouldbring upon me the mockery of every up-to-date student of mathematicalphysics in the country The best thing I can do therefore is, I think to give

my impressions in my own inexact language, without any attempt towear a garment of knowledge to which I have no claim

The object of Mr Cavor's search was a substance that should be

"opaque"—he used some other word I have forgotten, but "opaque" veys the idea—to "all forms of radiant energy." "Radiant energy," hemade me understand, was anything like light or heat, or those RontgenRays there was so much talk about a year or so ago, or the electric waves

con-of Marconi, or gravitation All these things, he said, _radiate_ out fromcentres, and act on bodies at a distance, whence comes the term "radiantenergy." Now almost all substances are opaque to some form or other ofradiant energy Glass, for example, is transparent to light, but much less

so to heat, so that it is useful as a fire-screen; and alum is transparent tolight, but blocks heat completely A solution of iodine in carbon

bisulphide, on the other hand, completely blocks light, but is quite parent to heat It will hide a fire from you, but permit all its warmth toreach you Metals are not only opaque to light and heat, but also to elec-trical energy, which passes through both iodine solution and glass al-most as though they were not interposed And so on.

trans-Now all known substances are "transparent" to gravitation You canuse screens of various sorts to cut off the light or heat, or electrical influ-ence of the sun, or the warmth of the earth from anything; you canscreen things by sheets of metal from Marconi's rays, but nothing will cutoff the gravitational attraction of the sun or the gravitational attraction ofthe earth Yet why there should be nothing is hard to say Cavor did notsee why such a substance should not exist, and certainly I could not tellhim I had never thought of such a possibility before He showed me bycalculations on paper, which Lord Kelvin, no doubt, or Professor Lodge,

or Professor Karl Pearson, or any of those great scientific people mighthave understood, but which simply reduced me to a hopeless muddle,that not only was such a substance possible, but that it must satisfy cer-tain conditions It was an amazing piece of reasoning Much as it amazedand exercised me at the time, it would be impossible to reproduce ithere "Yes," I said to it all, "yes; go on!" Suffice it for this story that he be-lieved he might be able to manufacture this possible substance opaque togravitation out of a complicated alloy of metals and something new—anew element, I fancy—called, I believe, _helium_, which was sent to himfrom London in sealed stone jars Doubt has been thrown upon this de-tail, but I am almost certain it was _helium_ he had sent him in sealedstone jars It was certainly something very gaseous and thin If only I hadtaken notes…

But then, how was I to foresee the necessity of taking notes?

Any one with the merest germ of an imagination will understand theextraordinary possibilities of such a substance, and will sympathise alittle with the emotion I felt as this understanding emerged from thehaze of abstruse phrases in which Cavor expressed himself Comic relief

in a play indeed! It was some time before I would believe that I had terpreted him aright, and I was very careful not to ask questions thatwould have enabled him to gauge the profundity of misunderstandinginto which he dropped his daily exposition But no one reading the story

in-of it here will sympathise fully, because from my barren narrative it will

be impossible to gather the strength of my conviction that this ing substance was positively going to be made

astonish-I do not recall that astonish-I gave my play an hour's consecutive work at anytime after my visit to his house My imagination had other things to do.There seemed no limit to the possibilities of the stuff; whichever way Itried I came on miracles and revolutions For example, if one wanted tolift a weight, however enormous, one had only to get a sheet of this sub-stance beneath it, and one might lift it with a straw My first natural im-pulse was to apply this principle to guns and ironclads, and all the ma-terial and methods of war, and from that to shipping, locomotion, build-ing, every conceivable form of human industry The chance that hadbrought me into the very birth-chamber of this new time—it was anepoch, no less—was one of those chances that come once in a thousandyears The thing unrolled, it expanded and expanded Among otherthings I saw in it my redemption as a business man I saw a parent com-pany, and daughter companies, applications to right of us, applications

to left, rings and trusts, privileges, and concessions spreading andspreading, until one vast, stupendous Cavorite company ran and ruledthe world

And I was in it!

I took my line straight away I knew I was staking everything, but Ijumped there and then

"We're on absolutely the biggest thing that has ever been invented," Isaid, and put the accent on "we." "If you want to keep me out of this,you'll have to do it with a gun I'm coming down to be your fourthlabourer to-morrow."

He seemed surprised at my enthusiasm, but not a bit suspicious orhostile Rather, he was self-depreciatory He looked at me doubtfully

"But do you really think—?" he said "And your play! How about thatplay?"

"It's vanished!" I cried "My dear sir, don't you see what you've got?Don't you see what you're going to do?"

That was merely a rhetorical turn, but positively, he didn't At first Icould not believe it He had not had the beginning of the inkling of anidea This astonishing little man had been working on purely theoreticalgrounds the whole time! When he said it was "the most important" re-search the world had ever seen, he simply meant it squared up so manytheories, settled so much that was in doubt; he had troubled no moreabout the application of the stuff he was going to turn out than if he hadbeen a machine that makes guns This was a possible substance, and hewas going to make it! V'la tout, as the Frenchman says

Beyond that, he was childish! If he made it, it would go down to terity as Cavorite or Cavorine, and he would be made an F.R.S., and hisportrait given away as a scientific worthy with Nature, and things likethat And that was all he saw! He would have dropped this bombshellinto the world as though he had discovered a new species of gnat, if ithad not happened that I had come along And there it would have lainand fizzled, like one or two other little things these scientific people havelit and dropped about us.

pos-When I realised this, it was I did the talking, and Cavor who said, "Goon!" I jumped up I paced the room, gesticulating like a boy of twenty Itried to make him understand his duties and responsibilities in the mat-ter—_our_ duties and responsibilities in the matter I assured him wemight make wealth enough to work any sort of social revolution we fan-cied, we might own and order the whole world I told him of companiesand patents, and the case for secret processes All these things seemed totake him much as his mathematics had taken me A look of perplexitycame into his ruddy little face He stammered something about indiffer-ence to wealth, but I brushed all that aside He had got to be rich, and itwas no good his stammering I gave him to understand the sort of man Iwas, and that I had had very considerable business experience I did nottell him I was an undischarged bankrupt at the time, because that wastemporary, but I think I reconciled my evident poverty with my financialclaims And quite insensibly, in the way such projects grow, the under-standing of a Cavorite monopoly grew up between us He was to makethe stuff, and I was to make the boom

I stuck like a leech to the "we"—"you" and "I" didn't exist for me

His idea was that the profits I spoke of might go to endow research,but that, of course, was a matter we had to settle later "That's all right," Ishouted, "that's all right." The great point, as I insisted, was to get thething done

"Here is a substance," I cried, "no home, no factory, no fortress, no shipcan dare to be without—more universally applicable even than a patentmedicine There isn't a solitary aspect of it, not one of its ten thousandpossible uses that will not make us rich, Cavor, beyond the dreams ofavarice!"

"No!" he said "I begin to see It's extraordinary how one gets newpoints of view by talking over things!"

"And as it happens you have just talked to the right man!"

"I suppose no one," he said, "is absolutely _averse_ to enormouswealth Of course there is one thing—"

He paused I stood still.

"It is just possible, you know, that we may not be able to make it afterall! It may be one of those things that are a theoretical possibility, but apractical absurdity Or when we make it, there may be some little hitch!"

"We'll tackle the hitch when it comes." said I

Chapter 2

The First Making of Cavorite

But Cavor's fears were groundless, so far as the actual making was cerned On the 14th of October, 1899, this incredible substance wasmade!

con-Oddly enough, it was made at last by accident, when Mr Cavor leastexpected it He had fused together a number of metals and certain otherthings—I wish I knew the particulars now!—and he intended to leavethe mixture a week and then allow it to cool slowly Unless he had mis-calculated, the last stage in the combination would occur when the stuffsank to a temperature of 60 degrees Fahrenheit But it chanced that, un-known to Cavor, dissension had arisen about the furnace tending Gibbs,who had previously seen to this, had suddenly attempted to shift it tothe man who had been a gardener, on the score that coal was soil, beingdug, and therefore could not possibly fall within the province of a joiner;the man who had been a jobbing gardener alleged, however, that coalwas a metallic or ore-like substance, let alone that he was cook But Spar-gus insisted on Gibbs doing the coaling, seeing that he was a joiner andthat coal is notoriously fossil wood Consequently Gibbs ceased to re-plenish the furnace, and no one else did so, and Cavor was too much im-mersed in certain interesting problems concerning a Cavorite flying ma-chine (neglecting the resistance of the air and one or two other points) toperceive that anything was wrong And the premature birth of his inven-tion took place just as he was coming across the field to my bungalow forour afternoon talk and tea

I remember the occasion with extreme vividness The water was ing, and everything was prepared, and the sound of his "zuzzoo" hadbrought me out upon the verandah His active little figure was blackagainst the autumnal sunset, and to the right the chimneys of his housejust rose above a gloriously tinted group of trees Remoter rose theWealden Hills, faint and blue, while to the left the hazy marsh spreadout spacious and serene And then—

boil-The chimneys jerked heavenward, smashing into a string of bricks asthey rose, and the roof and a miscellany of furniture followed Thenovertaking them came a huge white flame The trees about the buildingswayed and whirled and tore themselves to pieces, that sprang towardsthe flare My ears were smitten with a clap of thunder that left me deaf

on one side for life, and all about me windows smashed, unheeded

I took three steps from the verandah towards Cavor's house, and even

as I did so came the wind

Instantly my coat tails were over my head, and I was progressing ingreat leaps and bounds, and quite against my will, towards him In thesame moment the discoverer was seized, whirled about, and flewthrough the screaming air I saw one of my chimney pots hit the groundwithin six yards of me, leap a score of feet, and so hurry in great stridestowards the focus of the disturbance Cavor, kicking and flapping, camedown again, rolled over and over on the ground for a space, struggled

up and was lifted and borne forward at an enormous velocity, vanishing

at last among the labouring, lashing trees that writhed about his house

A mass of smoke and ashes, and a square of bluish shining substancerushed up towards the zenith A large fragment of fencing came sailingpast me, dropped edgeways, hit the ground and fell flat, and then theworst was over The aerial commotion fell swiftly until it was a merestrong gale, and I became once more aware that I had breath and feet Byleaning back against the wind I managed to stop, and could collect suchwits as still remained to me

In that instant the whole face of the world had changed The tranquilsunset had vanished, the sky was dark with scurrying clouds, everythingwas flattened and swaying with the gale I glanced back to see if my bun-galow was still in a general way standing, then staggered forwards to-wards the trees amongst which Cavor had vanished, and through whosetall and leaf-denuded branches shone the flames of his burning house

I entered the copse, dashing from one tree to another and clinging tothem, and for a space I sought him in vain Then amidst a heap ofsmashed branches and fencing that had banked itself against a portion ofhis garden wall I perceived something stir I made a run for this, but be-fore I reached it a brown object separated itself, rose on two muddy legs,and protruded two drooping, bleeding hands Some tattered ends of gar-ment fluttered out from its middle portion and streamed before thewind

For a moment I did not recognise this earthy lump, and then I saw that

it was Cavor, caked in the mud in which he had rolled He leant forwardagainst the wind, rubbing the dirt from his eyes and mouth

He extended a muddy lump of hand, and staggered a pace towards

me His face worked with emotion, little lumps of mud kept falling from

it He looked as damaged and pitiful as any living creature I have everseen, and his remark therefore amazed me exceedingly

"Gratulate me," he gasped; "gratulate me!"

"Congratulate you!" said I "Good heavens! What for?"

"I've done it."

"You _have_ What on earth caused that explosion?"

A gust of wind blew his words away I understood him to say that itwasn't an explosion at all The wind hurled me into collision with him,and we stood clinging to one another

"Try and get back—to my bungalow," I bawled in his ear He did nothear me, and shouted something about "three martyrs—science," andalso something about "not much good." At the time he laboured underthe impression that his three attendants had perished in the whirlwind.Happily this was incorrect Directly he had left for my bungalow theyhad gone off to the public-house in Lympne to discuss the question ofthe furnaces over some trivial refreshment

I repeated my suggestion of getting back to my bungalow, and thistime he understood We clung arm-in-arm and started, and managed atlast to reach the shelter of as much roof as was left to me For a space wesat in arm-chairs and panted All the windows were broken, and thelighter articles of furniture were in great disorder, but no irrevocabledamage was done Happily the kitchen door had stood the pressureupon it, so that all my crockery and cooking materials had survived Theoil stove was still burning, and I put on the water to boil again for tea.And that prepared, I could turn on Cavor for his explanation

"Quite correct," he insisted; "quite correct I've done it, and it's allright."

"But," I protested "All right! Why, there can't be a rick standing, or afence or a thatched roof undamaged for twenty miles round… "

"It's all right—_really_ I didn't, of course, foresee this little upset Mymind was preoccupied with another problem, and I'm apt to disregardthese practical side issues But it's all right—"

"My dear sir," I cried, "don't you see you've done thousands of pounds'worth of damage?"

"There, I throw myself on your discretion I'm not a practical man, ofcourse, but don't you think they will regard it as a cyclone?"

"But the explosion—"

"It was not an explosion It's perfectly simple Only, as I say, I'm apt tooverlook these little things Its that zuzzoo business on a larger scale In-advertently I made this substance of mine, this Cavorite, in a thin, widesheet… "

He paused "You are quite clear that the stuff is opaque to gravitation,that it cuts off things from gravitating towards each other?"

"Yes," said I "Yes."

"Well, so soon as it reached a temperature of 60 degrees Fahrenheit,and the process of its manufacture was complete, the air above it, theportions of roof and ceiling and floor above it ceased to have weight Isuppose you know—everybody knows nowadays—that, as a usualthing, the air _has_ weight, that it presses on everything at the surface ofthe earth, presses in all directions, with a pressure of fourteen and a halfpounds to the square inch?"

"I know that," said I "Go on."

"I know that too," he remarked "Only this shows you how uselessknowledge is unless you apply it You see, over our Cavorite this ceased

to be the case, the air there ceased to exert any pressure, and the airround it and not over the Cavorite was exerting a pressure of fourteenpounds and a half to the square in upon this suddenly weightless air.Ah! you begin to see! The air all about the Cavorite crushed in upon theair above it with irresistible force The air above the Cavorite was forcedupward violently, the air that rushed in to replace it immediately lostweight, ceased to exert any pressure, followed suit, blew the ceilingthrough and the roof off…

"You perceive," he said, "it formed a sort of atmospheric fountain, akind of chimney in the atmosphere And if the Cavorite itself hadn't beenloose and so got sucked up the chimney, does it occur to you whatwould have happened?"

I thought "I suppose," I said, "the air would be rushing up and upover that infernal piece of stuff now."

"Precisely," he said "A huge fountain—"

"Spouting into space! Good heavens! Why, it would have squirted allthe atmosphere of the earth away! It would have robbed the world of air!

It would have been the death of all mankind! That little lump of stuff!"

"Not exactly into space," said Cavor, "but as bad—practically It wouldhave whipped the air off the world as one peels a banana, and flung it

thousands of miles It would have dropped back again, of course—but

on an asphyxiated world! From our point of view very little better than if

it never came back!"

I stared As yet I was too amazed to realise how all my expectationshad been upset "What do you mean to do now?" I asked

"In the first place if I may borrow a garden trowel I will remove some

of this earth with which I am encased, and then if I may avail myself ofyour domestic conveniences I will have a bath This done, we will con-verse more at leisure It will be wise, I think"—he laid a muddy hand on

my arm—"if nothing were said of this affair beyond ourselves I know Ihave caused great damage—probably even dwelling-houses may beruined here and there upon the country-side But on the other hand, Icannot possibly pay for the damage I have done, and if the real cause ofthis is published, it will lead only to heartburning and the obstruction of

my work One cannot foresee everything, you know, and I cannot sent for one moment to add the burthen of practical considerations to mytheorising Later on, when you have come in with your practical mind,and Cavorite is floated—floated is the word, isn't it?—and it has realisedall you anticipate for it, we may set matters right with these persons Butnot now—not now If no other explanation is offered, people, in thepresent unsatisfactory state of meteorological science, will ascribe all this

con-to a cyclone; there might be a public subscription, and as my house hascollapsed and been burnt, I should in that case receive a considerableshare in the compensation, which would be extremely helpful to the pro-secution of our researches But if it is known that _I_ caused this, therewill be no public subscription, and everybody will be put out Practically

I should never get a chance of working in peace again My three ants may or may not have perished That is a detail If they have, it is nogreat loss; they were more zealous than able, and this premature eventmust be largely due to their joint neglect of the furnace If they have notperished, I doubt if they have the intelligence to explain the affair Theywill accept the cyclone story And if during the temporary unfitness of

assist-my house for occupation, I may lodge in one of the untenanted rooms ofthis bungalow of yours—"

He paused and regarded me

A man of such possibilities, I reflected, is no ordinary guest toentertain

"Perhaps," said I, rising to my feet, "we had better begin by looking for

a trowel," and I led the way to the scattered vestiges of the greenhouse

And while he was having his bath I considered the entire questionalone It was clear there were drawbacks to Mr Cavor's society I had notforeseen The absentmindedness that had just escaped depopulating theterrestrial globe, might at any moment result in some other grave incon-venience On the other hand I was young, my affairs were in a mess, and

I was in just the mood for reckless adventure—with a chance ofsomething good at the end of it I had quite settled in my mind that I was

to have half at least in that aspect of the affair Fortunately I held mybungalow, as I have already explained, on a three-year agreement,without being responsible for repairs; and my furniture, such as therewas of it, had been hastily purchased, was unpaid for, insured, and alto-gether devoid of associations In the end I decided to keep on with him,and see the business through

Certainly the aspect of things had changed very greatly I no longerdoubted at all the enormous possibilities of the substance, but I began tohave doubts about the gun-carriage and the patent boots We set to work

at once to reconstruct his laboratory and proceed with our experiments.Cavor talked more on my level than he had ever done before, when itcame to the question of how we should make the stuff next

"Of course we must make it again," he said, with a sort of glee I hadnot expected in him, "of course we must make it again We have caught aTartar, perhaps, but we have left the theoretical behind us for good andall If we can possibly avoid wrecking this little planet of ours, we will.But—there must be risks! There must be In experimental work there al-ways are And here, as a practical man, _you_ must come in For my ownpart it seems to me we might make it edgeways, perhaps, and very thin.Yet I don't know I have a certain dim perception of another method Ican hardly explain it yet But curiously enough it came into my mind,while I was rolling over and over in the mud before the wind, and verydoubtful how the whole adventure was to end, as being absolutely thething I ought to have done."

Even with my aid we found some little difficulty, and meanwhile wekept at work restoring the laboratory There was plenty to do before itbecame absolutely necessary to decide upon the precise form and meth-

od of our second attempt Our only hitch was the strike of the three bourers, who objected to my activity as a foreman But that matter wecompromised after two days' delay

la-Chapter 3

The Building of the Sphere

I remember the occasion very distinctly when Cavor told me of his idea

of the sphere He had had intimations of it before, but at the time itseemed to come to him in a rush We were returning to the bungalow fortea, and on the way he fell humming Suddenly he shouted, "That's it!That finishes it! A sort of roller blind!"

"Finishes what?" I asked

"Space—anywhere! The moon."

"What do you mean?"

"Mean? Why—it must be a sphere! That's what I mean!"

I saw I was out of it, and for a time I let him talk in his own fashion Ihadn't the ghost of an idea then of his drift But after he had taken tea hemade it clear to me

"It's like this," he said "Last time I ran this stuff that cuts things offfrom gravitation into a flat tank with an overlap that held it down Anddirectly it had cooled and the manufacture was completed all that uproarhappened, nothing above it weighed anything, the air went squirting up,the house squirted up, and if the stuff itself hadn't squirted up too, Idon't know what would have happened! But suppose the substance isloose, and quite free to go up?"

"It will go up at once!"

"Exactly With no more disturbance than firing a big gun."

"But what good will that do?"

"I'm going up with it!"

I put down my teacup and stared at him

"Imagine a sphere," he explained, "large enough to hold two peopleand their luggage It will be made of steel lined with thick glass; it willcontain a proper store of solidified air, concentrated food, water dis-tilling apparatus, and so forth And enamelled, as it were, on the outersteel—"

"Cavorite?"

"But how will you get inside?"

"There was a similar problem about a dumpling."

"Yes, I know But how?"

"That's perfectly easy An air-tight manhole is all that is needed That,

of course, will have to be a little complicated; there will have to be avalve, so that things may be thrown out, if necessary, without much loss

of air."

"Like Jules Verne's thing in _A Trip to the Moon_."

But Cavor was not a reader of fiction

"I begin to see," I said slowly "And you could get in and screw self up while the Cavorite was warm, and as soon as it cooled it wouldbecome impervious to gravitation, and off you would fly—"

your-"At a tangent."

"You would go off in a straight line—" I stopped abruptly "What is toprevent the thing travelling in a straight line into space for ever?" Iasked "You're not safe to get anywhere, and if you do—how will you getback?"

"I've just thought of that," said Cavor "That's what I meant when I saidthe thing is finished The inner glass sphere can be air-tight, and, exceptfor the manhole, continuous, and the steel sphere can be made in sec-tions, each section capable of rolling up after the fashion of a roller blind.These can easily be worked by springs, and released and checked byelectricity conveyed by platinum wires fused through the glass All that

is merely a question of detail So you see, that except for the thickness ofthe blind rollers, the Cavorite exterior of the sphere will consist of win-dows or blinds, whichever you like to call them Well, when all thesewindows or blinds are shut, no light, no heat, no gravitation, no radiantenergy of any sort will get at the inside of the sphere, it will fly onthrough space in a straight line, as you say But open a window, imagineone of the windows open Then at once any heavy body that chances to

be in that direction will attract us—"

I sat taking it in

"You see?" he said

"I don't quite see what we shall do it for! It's really only jumping offthe world and back again."

"Surely! For example, one might go to the moon."

"And when one got there? What would you find?"

"We should see—Oh! consider the new knowledge."

"Is there air there?"

"There may be."

"It's a fine idea," I said, "but it strikes me as a large order all the same.The moon! I'd much rather try some smaller things first."

"They're out of the question, because of the air difficulty."

"Why not apply that idea of spring blinds—Cavorite blinds in strongsteel cases—to lifting weights?"

"It wouldn't work," he insisted "After all, to go into outer space is not

so much worse, if at all, than a polar expedition Men go on polarexpeditions."

"Not business men And besides, they get paid for polar expeditions.And if anything goes wrong there are relief parties But this—it's just fir-ing ourselves off the world for nothing."

"Oh! sulphur, ores, gold perhaps, possibly new elements."

"Cost of carriage," I said "You know you're not a practical man Themoon's a quarter of a million miles away."

"It seems to me it wouldn't cost much to cart any weight anywhere ifyou packed it in a Cavorite case."

I had not thought of that "Delivered free on head of purchaser, eh?"

"It isn't as though we were confined to the moon."

My imagination was picking itself up again "After all," I said, "there'ssomething in these things There's travel—"

An extraordinary possibility came rushing into my mind Suddenly Isaw, as in a vision, the whole solar system threaded with Cavorite linersand spheres deluxe "Rights of pre-emption," came floating into myhead—planetary rights of pre-emption I recalled the old Spanish mono-poly in American gold It wasn't as though it was just this planet orthat—it was all of them I stared at Cavor's rubicund face, and suddenly

my imagination was leaping and dancing I stood up, I walked up anddown; my tongue was unloosened

"I'm beginning to take it in," I said; "I'm beginning to take it in." Thetransition from doubt to enthusiasm seemed to take scarcely any time atall "But this is tremendous!" I cried "This is Imperial! I haven't beendreaming of this sort of thing."

Once the chill of my opposition was removed, his own pent-up ment had play He too got up and paced He too gesticulated andshouted We behaved like men inspired We _were_ men inspired

excite-"We'll settle all that!" he said in answer to some incidental difficultythat had pulled me up "We'll soon settle that! We'll start the drawingsfor mouldings this very night."

"We'll start them now," I responded, and we hurried off to the ory to begin upon this work forthwith

laborat-I was like a child in Wonderland all that night The dawn found usboth still at work—we kept our electric light going heedless of the day Iremember now exactly how these drawings looked I shaded and tintedwhile Cavor drew—smudged and haste-marked they were in every line,but wonderfully correct We got out the orders for the steel blinds andframes we needed from that night's work, and the glass sphere was de-signed within a week We gave up our afternoon conversations and ourold routine altogether We worked, and we slept and ate when we couldwork no longer for hunger and fatigue Our enthusiasm infected evenour three men, though they had no idea what the sphere was for.Through those days the man Gibbs gave up walking, and went every-where, even across the room, at a sort of fussy run

And it grew—the sphere December passed, January—I spent a daywith a broom sweeping a path through the snow from bungalow tolaboratory—February, March By the end of March the completion was

in sight In January had come a team of horses, a huge packing-case; wehad our thick glass sphere now ready, and in position under the crane

we had rigged to sling it into the steel shell All the bars and blinds of the

steel shell—it was not really a spherical shell, but polyhedral, with aroller blind to each facet—had arrived by February, and the lower halfwas bolted together The Cavorite was half made by March, the metallicpaste had gone through two of the stages in its manufacture, and we hadplastered quite half of it on to the steel bars and blinds It was astonish-ing how closely we kept to the lines of Cavor's first inspiration in work-ing out the scheme When the bolting together of the sphere was fin-ished, he proposed to remove the rough roof of the temporary laboratory

in which the work was done, and build a furnace about it So the laststage of Cavorite making, in which the paste is heated to a dull red glow

in a stream of helium, would be accomplished when it was already onthe sphere

And then we had to discuss and decide what provisions we were totake—compressed foods, concentrated essences, steel cylinders contain-ing reserve oxygen, an arrangement for removing carbonic acid andwaste from the air and restoring oxygen by means of sodium peroxide,water condensers, and so forth I remember the little heap they made inthe corner—tins, and rolls, and boxes—convincingly matter-of-fact

It was a strenuous time, with little chance of thinking But one day,when we were drawing near the end, an odd mood came over me I hadbeen bricking up the furnace all the morning, and I sat down by thesepossessions dead beat Everything seemed dull and incredible

"But look here, Cavor," I said "After all! What's it all for?"

He smiled "The thing now is to go."

"The moon," I reflected "But what do you expect? I thought the moonwas a dead world."

He shrugged his shoulders

"We're going to see."

"Are we?" I said, and stared before me

"You are tired," he remarked "You'd better take a walk this afternoon."

"No," I said obstinately; "I'm going to finish this brickwork."

And I did, and insured myself a night of insomnia I don't think I haveever had such a night I had some bad times before my business collapse,but the very worst of those was sweet slumber compared to this infinity

of aching wakefulness I was suddenly in the most enormous funk at thething we were going to do

I do not remember before that night thinking at all of the risks we wererunning Now they came like that array of spectres that once belea-guered Prague, and camped around me The strangeness of what wewere about to do, the unearthliness of it, overwhelmed me I was like a

man awakened out of pleasant dreams to the most horrible ings I lay, eyes wide open, and the sphere seemed to get more flimsyand feeble, and Cavor more unreal and fantastic, and the whole enter-prise madder and madder every moment.

surround-I got out of bed and wandered about surround-I sat at the window and stared atthe immensity of space Between the stars was the void, the unfathom-able darkness! I tried to recall the fragmentary knowledge of astronomy Ihad gained in my irregular reading, but it was all too vague to furnishany idea of the things we might expect At last I got back to bed andsnatched some moments of sleep—moments of nightmare rather—inwhich I fell and fell and fell for evermore into the abyss of the sky

I astonished Cavor at breakfast I told him shortly, "I'm not comingwith you in the sphere."

I met all his protests with a sullen persistence "The thing's too mad," Isaid, "and I won't come The thing's too mad."

I would not go with him to the laboratory I fretted bout my bungalowfor a time, and then took hat and stick and set out alone, I knew notwhither It chanced to be a glorious morning: a warm wind and deepblue sky, the first green of spring abroad, and multitudes of birdssinging I lunched on beef and beer in a little public-house near Elham,and startled the landlord by remarking apropos of the weather, "A manwho leaves the world when days of this sort are about is a fool!"

"That's what I says when I heerd on it!" said the landlord, and I foundthat for one poor soul at least this world had proved excessive, and therehad been a throat-cutting I went on with a new twist to my thoughts

In the afternoon I had a pleasant sleep in a sunny place, and went on

my way refreshed I came to a comfortable-looking inn near Canterbury

It was bright with creepers, and the landlady was a clean old womanand took my eye I found I had just enough money to pay for my lodgingwith her I decided to stop the night there She was a talkative body, andamong many other particulars learnt she had never been to London

"Canterbury's as far as ever I been," she said "I'm not one of your about sort."

gad-"How would you like a trip to the moon?" I cried

"I never did hold with them ballooneys," she said evidently under theimpression that this was a common excursion enough "I wouldn't go up

in one—not for ever so."

This struck me as being funny After I had supped I sat on a bench bythe door of the inn and gossiped with two labourers about brickmaking,

and motor cars, and the cricket of last year And in the sky a faint newcrescent, blue and vague as a distant Alp, sank westward over the sun.The next day I returned to Cavor "I am coming," I said "I've been alittle out of order, that's all."

That was the only time I felt any serious doubt our enterprise Nervespurely! After that I worked a little more carefully, and took a trudge for

an hour every day And at last, save for the heating in the furnace, ourlabours were at an end

Chapter 4

Inside the Sphere

"Go on," said Cavor, as I sat across the edge of the manhole, and lookeddown into the black interior of the sphere We two were alone It wasevening, the sun had set, and the stillness of the twilight was uponeverything

I drew my other leg inside and slid down the smooth glass to the tom of the sphere, then turned to take the cans of food and other impedi-menta from Cavor The interior was warm, the thermometer stood ateighty, and as we should lose little or none of this by radiation, we weredressed in shoes and thin flannels We had, however, a bundle of thickwoollen clothing and several thick blankets to guard against mischance

bot-By Cavor's direction I placed the packages, the cylinders of oxygen,and so forth, loosely about my feet, and soon we had everything in Hewalked about the roofless shed for a time seeking anything we had over-looked, and then crawled in after me I noted something in his hand

"What have you got there?" I asked

"Haven't you brought anything to read?"

"Good Lord! No."

"I forgot to tell you There are uncertainties— The voyage may last—

We may be weeks!"

"But—"

"We shall be floating in this sphere with absolutely no occupation."

"I wish I'd known—"

He peered out of the manhole "Look!" he said "There's somethingthere!"

"Is there time?"

"We shall be an hour."

I looked out It was an old number of _Tit-Bits_ that one of the menmust have brought Farther away in the corner I saw a torn _Lloyd'sNews_ I scrambled back into the sphere with these things "What haveyou got?" I said

I took the book from his hand and read, "The Works of WilliamShakespeare".

He coloured slightly "My education has been so purely scientific—" hesaid apologetically

"Never read him?"

"Never."

"He knew a little, you know—in an irregular sort of way."

"Precisely what I am told," said Cavor

I assisted him to screw in the glass cover of the manhole, and then hepressed a stud to close the corresponding blind in the outer case Thelittle oblong of twilight vanished We were in darkness For a timeneither of us spoke Although our case would not be impervious tosound, everything was very still I perceived there was nothing to gripwhen the shock of our start should come, and I realised that I should beuncomfortable for want of a chair

"Why have we no chairs?" I asked

"I've settled all that," said Cavor "We won't need them."

"Why not?"

"You will see," he said, in the tone of a man who refuses to talk

I became silent Suddenly it had come to me clear and vivid that I was

a fool to be inside that sphere Even now, I asked myself, is to too late towithdraw? The world outside the sphere, I knew, would be cold and in-hospitable enough for me—for weeks I had been living on subsidiesfrom Cavor—but after all, would it be as cold as the infinite zero, as in-hospitable as empty space? If it had not been for the appearance of cow-ardice, I believe that even then I should have made him let me out But Ihesitated on that score, and hesitated, and grew fretful and angry, andthe time passed

There came a little jerk, a noise like champagne being uncorked in other room, and a faint whistling sound For just one instant I had asense of enormous tension, a transient conviction that my feet werepressing downward with a force of countless tons It lasted for an infin-itesimal time

an-But it stirred me to action "Cavor!" I said into the darkness, "mynerve's in rags I don't think—"

I stopped He made no answer

"Confound it!" I cried; "I'm a fool! What business have I here? I'm notcoming, Cavor The thing's too risky I'm getting out."

"You can't," he said

"Can't! We'll soon see about that!"

He made no answer for ten seconds "It's too late for us to quarrel now,Bedford," he said "That little jerk was the start Already we are flying asswiftly as a bullet up into the gulf of space."

"I—" I said, and then it didn't seem to matter what happened For atime I was, as it were, stunned; I had nothing to say It was just as if I hadnever heard of this idea of leaving the world before Then I perceived anunaccountable change in my bodily sensations It was a feeling of light-ness, of unreality Coupled with that was a queer sensation in the head,

an apoplectic effect almost, and a thumping of blood vessels at the ears.Neither of these feelings diminished as time went on, but at last I got soused to them that I experienced no inconvenience

I heard a click, and a little glow lamp came into being

I saw Cavor's face, as white as I felt my own to be We regarded oneanother in silence The transparent blackness of the glass behind himmade him seem as though he floated in a void

"Well, we're committed," I said at last

"Yes," he said, "we're committed."

"Don't move," he exclaimed, at some suggestion of a gesture "Let yourmuscles keep quite lax—as if you were in bed We are in a little universe

of our own Look at those things!"

He pointed to the loose cases and bundles that had been lying on theblankets in the bottom of the sphere I was astonished to see that theywere floating now nearly a foot from the spherical wall Then I saw fromhis shadow that Cavor was no longer leaning against the glass I thrustout my hand behind me, and found that I too was suspended in space,clear of the glass

I did not cry out nor gesticulate, but fear came upon me It was like ing held and lifted by something—you know not what The mere touch

be-of my hand against the glass moved me rapidly I understood what hadhappened, but that did not prevent my being afraid We were cut offfrom all exterior gravitation, only the attraction of objects within oursphere had effect Consequently everything that was not fixed to theglass was falling—slowly because of the slightness of ourmasses—towards the centre of gravity of our little world, which seemed

to be somewhere about the middle of the sphere, but rather nearer tomyself than Cavor, on account of my greater weight

"We must turn round," said Cavor, "and float back to back, with thethings between us."

It was the strangest sensation conceivable, floating thus loosely inspace, at first indeed horribly strange, and when the horror passed, not

disagreeable at all, exceeding restful; indeed, the nearest thing in earthlyexperience to it that I know is lying on a very thick, soft feather bed Butthe quality of utter detachment and independence! I had not reckoned onthings like this I had expected a violent jerk at starting, a giddy sense ofspeed Instead I felt—as if I were disembodied It was not like the begin-ning of a journey; it was like the beginning of a dream.

Chapter 5

The Journey to the Moon

Presently Cavor extinguished the light He said we had not overmuchenergy stored, and that what we had we must economise for reading.For a time, whether it was long or short I do not know, there was noth-ing but blank darkness

A question floated up out of the void "How are we pointing?" I said

"What is our direction?"

"We are flying away from the earth at a tangent, and as the moon isnear her third quarter we are going somewhere towards her I will open

a blind—"

Came a click, and then a window in the outer case yawned open Thesky outside was as black as the darkness within the sphere, but the shape

of the open window was marked by an infinite number of stars

Those who have only seen the starry sky from the earth cannot gine its appearance when the vague, half luminous veil of our air hasbeen withdrawn The stars we see on earth are the mere scattered surviv-ors that penetrate our misty atmosphere But now at last I could realisethe meaning of the hosts of heaven!

ima-Stranger things we were presently to see, but that airless, star-dustedsky! Of all things, I think that will be one of the last I shall forget

The little window vanished with a click, another beside it snappedopen and instantly closed, and then a third, and for a moment I had toclose my eyes because of the blinding splendour of the waning moon.For a space I had to stare at Cavor and the white-lit things about me toseason my eyes to light again, before I could turn them towards that pal-lid glare

Four windows were open in order that the gravitation of the moonmight act upon all the substances in our sphere I found I was no longerfloating freely in space, but that my feet were resting on the glass in thedirection of the moon The blankets and cases of provisions were alsocreeping slowly down the glass, and presently came to rest so as to block

out a portion of the view It seemed to me, of course, that I looked

"down" when I looked at the moon On earth "down" means earthward,the way things fall, and "up" the reverse direction Now the pull of grav-itation was towards the moon, and for all I knew to the contrary ourearth was overhead And, of course, when all the Cavorite blinds wereclosed, "down" was towards the centre of our sphere, and "up" towardsits outer wall

It was curiously unlike earthly experience, too, to have the light ing up to one On earth light falls from above, or comes slanting downsideways, but here it came from beneath our feet, and to see our shad-ows we had to look up

com-At first it gave me a sort of vertigo to stand only on thick glass andlook down upon the moon through hundreds of thousands of miles ofvacant space; but this sickness passed very speedily And then—thesplendour of the sight!

The reader may imagine it best if he will lie on the ground some warmsummer's night and look between his upraised feet at the moon, but forsome reason, probably because the absence of air made it so much moreluminous, the moon seemed already considerably larger than it doesfrom earth The minutest details of its surface were acutely clear Andsince we did not see it through air, its outline was bright and sharp, therewas no glow or halo about it, and the star-dust that covered the sky cameright to its very margin, and marked the outline of its unilluminatedpart And as I stood and stared at the moon between my feet, that per-ception of the impossible that had been with me off and on ever sinceour start, returned again with tenfold conviction

"Cavor," I said, "this takes me queerly Those companies we were ing to run, and all that about minerals?"

go-"Well?"

"I don't see 'em here."

"No," said Cavor; "but you'll get over all that."

"I suppose I'm made to turn right side up again Still, _this_— For amoment I could half believe there never was a world."

"That copy of _Lloyd's News_ might help you."

I stared at the paper for a moment, then held it above the level of myface, and found I could read it quite easily I struck a column of meanlittle advertisements "A gentleman of private means is willing to lendmoney," I read I knew that gentleman Then somebody eccentric wanted

to sell a Cutaway bicycle, "quite new and cost 15 pounds," for fivepounds; and a lady in distress wished to dispose of some fish knives and

forks, "a wedding present," at a great sacrifice No doubt some simplesoul was sagely examining these knives and forks, and another tri-umphantly riding off on that bicycle, and a third trustfully consultingthat benevolent gentleman of means even as I read I laughed, and let thepaper drift from my hand.

"Are we visible from the earth?" I asked

"Why?"

"I knew some one who was rather interested in astronomy It occurred

to me that it would be rather odd if—my friend—chanced to be lookingthrough come telescope."

"It would need the most powerful telescope on earth even now to see

us as the minutest speck."

For a time I stared in silence at the moon

"It's a world," I said; "one feels that infinitely more than one ever did

on earth People perhaps—"

"People!" he exclaimed "No! Banish all that! Think yourself a sort ofultra-arctic voyager exploring the desolate places of space Look at it!"

He waved his hand at the shining whiteness below "It's dead—dead!Vast extinct volcanoes, lava wildernesses, tumbled wastes of snow, orfrozen carbonic acid, or frozen air, and everywhere landslip seams andcracks and gulfs Nothing happens Men have watched this planet sys-tematically with telescopes for over two hundred years How muchchange do you think they have seen?"

"None."

"They have traced two indisputable landslips, a doubtful crack, andone slight periodic change of colour, and that's all."

"I didn't know they'd traced even that."

"Oh, yes But as for people—!"

"By the way," I asked, "how small a thing will the biggest telescopesshow upon the moon?"

"One could see a fair-sized church One could certainly see any towns

or buildings, or anything like the handiwork of men There might haps be insects, something in the way of ants, for example, so that theycould hide in deep burrows from the lunar light, or some new sort ofcreatures having no earthly parallel That is the most probable thing, if

per-we are to find life there at all Think of the difference in conditions! Lifemust fit itself to a day as long as fourteen earthly days, a cloudless sun-blaze of fourteen days, and then a night of equal length, growing evercolder and colder under these, cold, sharp stars In that night there must

be cold, the ultimate cold, absolute zero, 273 degrees Centigrade, below

the earthly freezing point Whatever life there is must hibernate throughthat, and rise again each day."

He mused "One can imagine something worm-like," he said, "takingits air solid as an earth-worm swallows earth, or thick-skinnedmonsters—"

"By the bye," I said, "why didn't we bring a gun?"

He did not answer that question "No," he concluded, "we just have to

go We shall see when we get there."

I remembered something "Of course, there's my minerals, anyhow," Isaid; "whatever the conditions may be."

Presently he told me he wished to alter our course a little by letting theearth tug at us for a moment He was going to open one earthward blindfor thirty seconds He warned me that it would make my head swim,and advised me to extend my hands against the glass to break my fall Idid as he directed, and thrust my feet against the bales of food cases andair cylinders to prevent their falling upon me Then with a click the win-dow flew open I fell clumsily upon hands and face, and saw for a mo-ment between my black extended fingers our mother earth—a planet in adownward sky

We were still very near—Cavor told me the distance was perhapseight hundred miles and the huge terrestrial disc filled all heaven Butalready it was plain to see that the world was a globe The land below uswas in twilight and vague, but westward the vast gray stretches of theAtlantic shone like molten silver under the receding day I think I recog-nised the cloud-dimmed coast-lines of France and Spain and the south ofEngland, and then, with a click, the shutter closed again, and I foundmyself in a state of extraordinary confusion sliding slowly over thesmooth glass

When at last things settled themselves in my mind again, it seemedquite beyond question that the moon was "down" and under my feet,and that the earth was somewhere away on the level of the horizon—theearth that had been "down" to me and my kindred since the beginning ofthings

So slight were the exertions required of us, so easy did the practicalannihilation of our weight make all we had to do, that the necessity fortaking refreshment did not occur to us for nearly six hours (by Cavor'schronometer) after our start I was amazed at that lapse of time Eventhen I was satisfied with very little Cavor examined the apparatus forabsorbing carbonic acid and water, and pronounced it to be in satisfact-ory order, our consumption of oxygen having been extraordinarily

slight And our talk being exhausted for the time, and there being ing further for us to do, we gave way to a curious drowsiness that hadcome upon us, and spreading our blankets on the bottom of the sphere insuch a manner as to shut out most of the moonlight, wished each othergood-night, and almost immediately fell asleep.

noth-And so, sleeping, and sometimes talking and reading a little, and attimes eating, although without any keenness of appetite,1 but for themost part in a sort of quiescence that was neither waking nor slumber,

we fell through a space of time that had neither night nor day in it, lently, softly, and swiftly down towards the moon

si-1.It is a curious thing, that while we were in the sphere we felt not the slightest sire for food, nor did we feel the want of it when we abstained At first we forced our appetites, but afterwards we fasted completely Altogether we did not consume one- hundredth part of the compressed provisions we had brought with us The amount

de-of carbonic acid we breathed was also unnaturally low, but why this was, I am quite unable to explain.

Chapter 6

The Landing on the Moon

I remember how one day Cavor suddenly opened six of our shutters andblinded me so that I cried aloud at him The whole area was moon, a stu-pendous scimitar of white dawn with its edge hacked out by notches ofdarkness, the crescent shore of an ebbing tide of darkness, out of whichpeaks and pinnacles came glittering into the blaze of the sun I take it thereader has seen pictures or photographs of the moon and that I need notdescribe the broader features of that landscape, those spacious ring-likeranges vaster than any terrestrial mountains, their summits shining inthe day, their shadows harsh and deep, the gray disordered plains, theridges, hills, and craterlets, all passing at last from a blazing illuminationinto a common mystery of black Athwart this world we were flyingscarcely a hundred miles above its crests and pinnacles And now wecould see, what no eye on earth will ever see, that under the blaze of theday the harsh outlines of the rocks and ravines of the plains and craterfloor grew gray and indistinct under a thickening haze, that the white oftheir lit surfaces broke into lumps and patches, and broke again andshrank and vanished, and that here and there strange tints of brown andolive grew and spread

But little time we had for watching then For now we had come to thereal danger of our journey We had to drop ever closer to the moon as wespun about it, to slacken our pace and watch our chance, until at last wecould dare to drop upon its surface

For Cavor that was a time of intense exertion; for me it was an anxiousinactivity I seemed perpetually to be getting out of his way He leaptabout the sphere from point to point with an agility that would havebeen impossible on earth He was perpetually opening and closing theCavorite windows, making calculations, consulting his chronometer bymeans of the glow lamp during those last eventful hours For a long time

we had all our windows closed and hung silently in darkness hurlingthrough space

Then he was feeling for the shutter studs, and suddenly four windowswere open I staggered and covered my eyes, drenched and scorched andblinded by the unaccustomed splendour of the sun beneath my feet.Then again the shutters snapped, leaving my brain spinning in a dark-ness that pressed against the eyes And after that I floated in anothervast, black silence.

Then Cavor switched on the electric light, and told me he proposed tobind all our luggage together with the blankets about it, against the con-cussion of our descent We did this with our windows closed, because inthat way our goods arranged themselves naturally at the centre of thesphere That too was a strange business; we two men floating loose inthat spherical space, and packing and pulling ropes Imagine it if youcan! No up nor down, and every effort resulting in unexpected move-ments Now I would be pressed against the glass with the full force ofCavor's thrust, now I would be kicking helplessly in a void Now the star

of the electric light would be overhead, now under foot Now Cavor'sfeet would float up before my eyes, and now we would be crossways toeach other But at last our goods were safely bound together in a big softbale, all except two blankets with head holes that we were to wrap aboutourselves

Then for a flash Cavor opened a window moonward, and we saw that

we were dropping towards a huge central crater with a number of minorcraters grouped in a sort of cross about it And then again Cavor flungour little sphere open to the scorching, blinding sun I think he was usingthe sun's attraction as a brake "Cover yourself with a blanket," he cried,thrusting himself from me, and for a moment I did not understand

Then I hauled the blanket from beneath my feet and got it about meand over my head and eyes Abruptly he closed the shutters again,snapped one open again and closed it, then suddenly began snappingthem all open, each safely into its steel roller There came a jar, and then

we were rolling over and over, bumping against the glass and againstthe big bale of our luggage, and clutching at each other, and outsidesome white substance splashed as if we were rolling down a slope ofsnow…

Over, clutch, bump, clutch, bump, over…

Came a thud, and I was half buried under the bale of our possessions,and for a space everything was still Then I could hear Cavor puffing andgrunting, and the snapping of a shutter in its sash I made an effort,thrust back our blanket-wrapped luggage, and emerged from beneath it.Our open windows were just visible as a deeper black set with stars

We were still alive, and we were lying in the darkness of the shadow

of the wall of the great crater into which we had fallen

We sat getting our breath again, and feeling the bruises on our limbs Idon't think either of us had had a very clear expectation of such roughhandling as we had received I struggled painfully to my feet "Andnow," said I, "to look at the landscape of the moon! But—! It's tremend-ously dark, Cavor!"

The glass was dewy, and as I spoke I wiped at it with my blanket

"We're half an hour or so beyond the day," he said "We must wait."

It was impossible to distinguish anything We might have been in asphere of steel for all that we could see My rubbing with the blanketsimply smeared the glass, and as fast as I wiped it, it became opaqueagain with freshly condensed moisture mixed with an increasing quant-ity of blanket hairs Of course I ought not to have used the blanket In myefforts to clear the glass I slipped upon the damp surface, and hurt myshin against one of the oxygen cylinders that protruded from our bale.The thing was exasperating—it was absurd Here we were just arrivedupon the moon, amidst we knew not what wonders, and all we could seewas the gray and streaming wall of the bubble in which we had come

"Confound it!" I said, "but at this rate we might have stopped athome;" and I squatted on the bale and shivered, and drew my blanketcloser about me

Abruptly the moisture turned to spangles and fronds of frost "Canyou reach the electric heater," said Cavor "Yes—that black knob Or weshall freeze."

I did not wait to be told twice "And now," said I, "what are we to do?"

"Wait," he said

"Wait?"

"Of course We shall have to wait until our air gets warm again, andthen this glass will clear We can't do anything till then It's night hereyet; we must wait for the day to overtake us Meanwhile, don't you feelhungry?"

For a space I did not answer him, but sat fretting I turned reluctantlyfrom the smeared puzzle of the glass and stared at his face "Yes," I said,

"I am hungry I feel somehow enormously disappointed I had ted—I don't know what I had expected, but not this."

expec-I summoned my philosophy, and rearranging my blanket about me satdown on the bale again and began my first meal on the moon I don'tthink I finished it—I forget Presently, first in patches, then running